Still in the Realm of the Sun
by Assimbya
Summary: Code Name Verity. AU. Maddie and Julie find one another again. Written for the 2013 Yuletide Challenge.


The deep orange of the pullover was bright under the floodlights, in the gray shadows of this night on which everyone else seemed to want to fade into the ground - the guards in their uniforms, the prisoners in their dull, dirty garments, Maddie's band of rebels dressed for camouflage. She has always thought of the pullover as like fallen leaves, reminding her of cocoa and milky tea and sitting on her bed with her knees curled in, talking in the dark. But now, it looks more like flame. Resistance, she thinks, courage. This can be no one but Julie.

Time at once seemed to shrink down and expand around her - each second seemed to contain a lifetime, yet her heart was speeding up, the blood whirring against her skin like an engine motor. How quickly can a finger pull a trigger or a bullet fly through the air? She thought about her recent hours of shooting practice. She thought about the guards, with their rifles pointed into the waiting dark. She thought that she would not mind if they shot her, if it meant that Julie could get out alive and whole. She thought that all her life had telescoped into this single pinprick of a moment.

The signal came, and they ran at the assemblage of guards and prisoners, bullets shattering the air. Maddie felt her running legs go numb beneath her. She was too scared to fire, terrified of where her bullet might lodge. She kept her eyes fixed upon the orange of the pullover. The guard holding onto Julie was struck in the shoulder; he cried out and let go of her, reeling in pain. Julie, who must be struggling to balance with her wrists bound, tripped and fell forward, onto her face. Maddie winced at the sight, but knew that at least this put her out of the direct line of fire. She ran.

She would not remember afterwards how those moments passed, how she reached Julie's side, but she did, pulled her to her feet, and they ducked their heads as though avoiding a rainstorm and ran together, Julie half collapsing onto Maddie's shoulder, the mud slippery beneath their feet. When all was quiet, Maddie helped Julie to sit against a tree, tried to get to work upon the wire binding her wrists - it was tight, and was cutting into her skin, leaving ugly scratches that Maddie feared to worsen. It was dark, and panic made her clumsy. Julie's wrists and fingered looked so thin and brittle, as though they could snap at the slightest touch. Julie, her face turned away from Maddie, was laughing and sobbing, seemingly indiscrimnately. "Maddie," she said, her voice hoarse and raw but unmistakably her own, "Maddie, you found me."

And, then, for a moment, with gunshots echoing in the distance, Maddie left off her fumblings with the wire and just held on to Julie, feeling the solidity of her body in her arms, the hot realness of her brath against her neck.

Of course, the war did not end in the press of Julie's body against Maddie's own, and at the end of the night the road was stinking with bodies and riddled with bullets. Paul was dead. Mitraillette, as his second-in-command, tried to give Maddie a stern talking to for ignoring their battle plans and running off with Julie into the night, but her heart wasn't in it. Too many were dead, and Julie was alive. It was impossible to trace back their steps and imagine other possibilities for how the night could have gone.

Julie could not be hidden anywhere near the Thibaut house, and for safety Maddie was not told where she was taken. It hurt even to be out of her sight, but Maddie heard from Mitraillette that Julie was passing them valuable information, that she had somehow, despite her arrest, managed to complete the mission to which she was assigned. It comforted Maddie, who was shaky with the thought of Julie's bleeding wrists, to think of her witty and gleaming, handing out glittering shards of hard-won knowledge.

They broke into the Gestapo HQ. Maddie went on the mission, but Julie did not. Maddie could feel her everywhere in the prison cells which they liberated. _She was tortured here, _Maddie could not help thinking, _they hurt her. _And rage burned, the color of Julie's orange pullover.

It was Jaime who flew them both back to England, on a clear, bright night, perfect for flying, with the moon yellow and full. Maddie thought, remembering the flight afterwards, that she spent all of it either crying or laughing.

When they debriefed Julie, back in England, Maddie wasn't allowed to go into the interrogation room with her. She stayed in the bedroom they had once shared and screamed into her pillow.

Julie returned with her lips set in a narrow line and her shoulders shaking. Maddie felt outraged on her behalf. "If they said a single harsh word to you," she told her, "after everything that's happened -"

Julie shook her head. Her gold hair was still tangled and dirty, as she would never have let it get before her imprisonment; she had been taken in for debriefing before almost anything else. "It's not that," she told Maddie, "they decoded a message, from the wireless operator in Ormaie. Von Linden - the Gestapo commander at the prison - is dead. They think it was suicide." Her voice quavered.

"Good," Maddie said fiercely, "his conscience finally caught up with him."

Julie sobbed once, suddenly, and put her face in her hands. "He was a cold, heartless man," she said shakly, "I shouldn't be crying for him, after everyone else whose died - he made me watch an execution, Maddie. this girl from the Resistance, she was so beautful and so brave. Marie. She told her name, before she died. I should be crying for her, for all of those like her, not for him. But he had a daughter. He was a headmaster before the war, and I bet that he was a good one, he wouldn't have been doing any of this if hadn't thought he had to, not as though that's any excuse, but - I don't know. I know how it works, being an interrogator, and I can imagine -" Julie was speaking rapidly, as though she had to get the words out at once or she would lose them. "Sometimes I thought that he wasn't so unlike me, though our methods differ, and if our positions had been reversed - god, Maddie, I don't know who I am any longer."

Maddie couldn't dare to hold Julie when she was like this, tremors snaking through her limbs, poised on the edge of a place that Maddie could not imagine. So she only sat down quietly beside her, and left her hand upon the bedspread for Julie to grab hold of if she wished to. "I don't know what happened in that prison, and I don't think I could ever understand if completely, though I promise you that I'll try. But - I look at you and I still see you, Julie. I see my best friend, who will launch herself into ridiculous games at the drop of a hat, and who stayed with me even when I was panicking like a baby over bombs and gunshots, and who sometimes acts like the most insufferable snob ever to come out of Scotland. I love you, and whatever happened there could never change that."

For a moment, Julie just seemed to listen, and breathe, but then she took her face out of her palms and took hold of Maddie's hand, squeezing at her fingers in a way that was devastatingly familiar. "I wrote so much, there. They were calling it my confession, but I made up so much of it that it was really more of a means of stalling for time than anything else. But, I kept thinking, while I was writing it - and I wrote so much nonsense, and serious things too, about you and I, about your pilot training and all the absurd things we got up to and whatever else came into my head - I kept imagining that I was writing it for you, somehow, even after they showed me the photographs and I thought that you were dead. I thought of you reading it, and seeing all the true parts, and remembering me, and us together. I felt like _myself, _when I was writing it, and so much of that was because of you, because I held onto you in my mind and wondered what you would think and whether I was telling it correctly. It was like the only good part of me, the part that was pure and real and not all swallowed up in the sheer _ugliness _of it, was the part of me that had met you and been your friend."

"That's not over," Maddie told her softly, "you're still here, and I'm still here, and we're both still us. I'll stay with you as long as you want. I love you, Julie."

With a sharp gasp of breath, as though she had been running, Julie threw her arms around Maddie.

The morning sunlight dripped in through the window, making the egg yolks gleam gold - they still had plenty of eggs at Castle Craig, even now. Maddie watched Julie's shining head bent over her plate, her inky fingers clutching at her fork. Julie struggled still to eat slowly, rather than gulping her food down hastily as though it would be taken away from her. Maddie thought how beautiful she was, here in the place where she had grown up. It was good to see Julie here, she thought, to notice all the places where she fit into the setting like a puzzle piece. But Maddie could see that Julie was tired. There were so many memories here for her, even though most of thos ewere good ones, and the boys kept accosting Maddie and Julie to ask them excited questions as if they were returning heroes.

"Come on," said Maddie, when Julie's plate was clean, "let's spend some time alone for once."

Julie's bedroom was ancient and almost too beautiful, like a princess' room. Descendent of Mary Queen of Scots, after all. In the daylight it was bright and peaceful. Maddie stood in the doorway as Julie let down the thin curtain, through which the sunlight still passed but dappled, as through water.

"Maddie," she began, and then paused, as though unsure of whether she was going to go on at all. Finally she continued, "I want….to be looked at, and touched, but I don't know - I might get frightened, I might not be able to go on. I just - my body is diferent now, and I don't know how you'd feel -"

Maddie thought of Julie's body the way she'd seen it before, all the curves and angles of it, the pointed knobs of her elbows and the softness of her abdomen. "I will," she said, "if you're ready. We can go slowly -"

Julie laughed, suddenly, and Maddie couldn't help grinning at the sound of it, at the way Julie's face broke into a smile all at once. "I'm bad at going slowly, you know that."

"But I'm good at it," Maddie told her, "I can keep us steady. It's okay. We have time, now. I'll be here."

"Thank you," Julie said softly. And, beneath the soft light, she undressed, pullover first, then blouse, skirt. There was a moment, when she was standing in front of Maddie in her bra and underpants, when Julie did not seem able to stand it, when she turned her face away and seemed to be holding back tears. But, in a few breaths, she seemed to swallow it down, and she met Maddie's eyes, giving her a small smile as if offerring her body for approval.

Maddie took a step forward. "Is it all right if I touch you?" she asked. Julie nodded. Maddie reached out and placed a hand upon Julie's shoulder, tracing across her collarbone, down her sternum. Her skin _was _different. It was difficult to see individual scars, in this light, but it was as though all of it had gone strangely dappled, with little dots of silver and white scattered so that she could have missed them if she hadn't been looking. Beneath her fingers, she could feel variations in texture, trace along lines and pinprick dots and eerie, ridged triangles. She was gentle. She wanted to cry with grief and joy all at once.

"Hard to hold onto vanity after all that," Julie said, her voice low, "after being a broken wireless set. I didn't imagine anyone looking at me like this again."

"You aren't any less beautiful," Maddie said. She felt dizzy with Julie's nearness, with the feel of her skin.

Julie laughed again, shortly. "And you, I think, have gotten more so. Wanting you was like….like wanting tea or eggs or butter or sugar, like something I felt in my body. Stay with me, Maddie?"

"Always," Maddie said, and kissed her.


End file.
